Jason Howerton Texas Gov. Rick Perry warned the federal Bureau of Land Management to stay away from Texas amid new concerns that it may be looking to claim thousands of acres of land in the northern part of the state.…

Clearest picture yet of mystery aircraft spotted flying over Kansas just weeks after being seen in Texas A new image shows a mysterious aircraft flying over Kansas The jet appears to be the same one that was spotted over Texas…

Tough state restrictions will likely have the state down to its final six abortion clinics by September. Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis attempted to stop House Bill 2 through an 11 hour filibuster last summer.(Win McNamee/Getty Images) photo of…

A bill waiting for Gov. Rick Perry’s signature would set up even stricter protections for user data than current federal law. By Brian Fung (Chet Susslin) Despite having lost his bid for the presidency, Texas Governor Rick Perry now finds…

If signed into law, cops would finally need a warrant to get location data.
by Cyrus Farivar
If the bill passes, Austin, Texas could lead the nation in mobile privacy protection.
fusionpanda Privacy experts say that a pair of new mobile privacy bills recently introduced in Texas are among the “most sweeping” ever seen. And they say the proposed legislation offers better protection than a related privacy bill introduced this week in Congress.

If passed, the new bills would establish a well-defined, probable-cause-driven warrant requirement for all location information. That’s not just data from GPS, but potentially pen register, tap and trace, and tower location data as well. Such data would be disclosed to law enforcement “if there is probable cause to believe the records disclosing location information will provide evidence in a criminal investigation.”

Further, the bills would require an annual transparency report from mobile carriers to the public and to the state government.

Under current federal case law and statute, law enforcement generally has broad warrantless powers to not only track suspects in real-time based on their phone data, but also to access records of where and when calls were made or text messages were sent or received—and all of this is provided by the carriers.

DALLAS – An online petition calling for Texas to secede from the United States is gaining support. More than 80,000 people have signed the petition since it was uploaded to the White House’s website Friday by an Arlington man.

“Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world,” the petition reads, “it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the Union.”

The petition sparked intense reaction online and triggered a response from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who hinted in 2009 that Texas could seek independence. On Tuesday, he backed off the idea of secession.

“People are free to do whatever people want to do,” Perry said at a news conference in Austin. “We’ve got a great country.”

The Obama administration has once more gone too far in its “overreach,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Monday, after the Justice Department objected to the state’s new voter photo ID law, saying Texas failed to demonstrate that the law is not discriminatory by design against Hispanic voters.

“Texas has a responsibility to ensure elections are fair, beyond reproach and accurately reflect the will of voters. The DOJ has no valid reason for rejecting this important law, which requires nothing more extensive than the type of photo identification necessary to receive a library card or board an airplane. Their denial is yet another example of the Obama administration’s continuing and pervasive federal overreach,” Perry said.

On Monday, the Justice Dpartment’s head of the civil rights division, Tom Perez, sent a a six-page letter to Texas’ director of elections saying that Texas has not “sustained its burden” under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to show that the new law will not have a discriminatory effect on minority voters. About 11 percent of Hispanic voters reportedly lack state-issued identification.

Perez wrote that while the state says the new photo ID requirement is to “ensure electoral integrity and deter ineligible voters from voting” the state “did not include evidence of significant in-person voter impersonation not already addressed by the state’s existing laws.”

As two Border Patrol agents surveyed a patch of brush on a remote ranch along the U.S. border with Mexico,19,000 feet overhead an unmanned Predator aircraft used its heat-sensing eye to see what the human eye could not.

In an operations center about 80 miles away, all eyes were on a suspicious dark cluster on a video screen. Moments later, the drone operators triggered the craft’s infrared beam and pointed the agents directly to the undergrowth where two silent figures were hiding.

Last week’s mission was just another night out for a Predator program that is playing a larger role in the nation’s border security as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection adds to its force of unmanned aircraft. The agency received its second Predator B aircraft in Texas last month and will add its sixth overall on the Southwest border when another is based in Arizona by the end of the year.